A Hierarchical XGBoost Early Detection Method for Quality and Productivity Improvement of Electronics Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

This paper presents XGBoost classifier-based methods to solve three tasks proposed by the European Prognostics and Health Management Society (PHME) 2022 conference. These tasks are based on real data from a Surface Mount Technologies line. Each of these tasks aims to improve the efficiency of the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) manufacturing process, facilitate the operator’s work and minimize the cases of manual intervention. Due to the structured nature of the problems proposed for each task, an XGBoost method based on encoding and feature engineering is proposed. The proposed methods utilise the fusion of test values and system characteristics extracted from two different testing equipment of the Surface Mount Technologies lines. This work also explores the problems of generalising prediction at the system level using information from the subsystem data. For this particular industrial case: the challenges with the changes in the number of subsystems. For Industry 4.0, the need for interpretability is very important. This is why the results of the models are analysed using Shapley values. With the proposed method, our team took the first place, capable of successfully detecting at an early stage the defective components for tasks 2 and 3.